Realign the phase inverters to calibrate the flux of the tachyon field...
A techno jargon generator would produce text that would seem equally comprehensible/incomprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the definitions of the terms used. Just because I don't understand something doesn't mean it doesn't make sense, what's interesting about the article is that it recounts the author's attempt to find out if literary criticism has content or not.
What I appreciated about the article here, as opposed to the one by Sokal, is that rather than just dismissing the entire enterprise he makes a genuine attempt to understand what's going on and to see what has merit and what doesn't. Also, the analysis of how the incentives for academics work was right on target --- he didn't say that humanties professors are morons, they are just doing what they rewarded for, responding to incentives they face.
I find Sokal, on the other hand, just as much of a holier-than-thou elitist as the people he criticizes, though he's a good deal funnier.
What Morningstar claims to have found from his explorations is a few good ideas with a whole lot of shite slathered on top. That would describe many many other academic disciplines outside the humanities as well.
Someone has already posted a complete poem from the Cyberiad, on abstract mathematics. It's great, and contains references to several wellknown poems/poets.
how many (hundreds of? thousands of?) poems were discarded by humans in an attempt to find a couple good ones,
Exactly --- algorithmic techniques can be great for providing input and inspiration, but the creative process is as much about discarding bad ideas as it is about coming up with good ones. Producing anything decent, never mind great, requires "killing your babies," being willing to get rid of things that may be funny/clever/evocative on their own, but don't contribute to the whole.
I've been working on a project (nicknamed "beat geek" in my head) that uses the digital equivalents of dada/beat cut-up techniques and other forms of randomness in or artificial generation of language.
For example, I have a program called autopoem (written by Bill Sethares) loosely based on an idea from Shannon's original paper on information theory.
Suppose you took all the words in the English language and calculated how often the character "s" is followed by the character "t", the character "e", and so on. You'd end with a table of transition probabilities that showed how often each letter is followed by any other letter (or punctuation mark or space) and starting with a single seed letter you could generate "english-like" words randomly. The output using the probability that a single letter is followed by another letter doesn't actually resemble English much, nor does the output using probabilities based on two letter combinations (how often is "th" followed by "e", by "a", and so on) but by the time you get to 3 letter combinations, (how often is "the" followed by "a" or by "s") the output starts to look a lot like "twas brillig and the slithy toves", like ye olde englishe with very creative spelling.
The scheme I described above is difficult to implement in practice, because the table of probabilities gets big fast as the number of letters used to determine the next letter gets longer. Autopoem uses a particular text as a source and instead of generating a table of probabilities it scans the text looking for the next of the letter sequence, say "the", and then selects whatever letter or punctuation mark comes next, say "a", then it continues scanning until it finds the next occurrence of "hea", and selects the following letter, and so on. the longer the sequence of letters, the more likely it is that whole words or phrases from the original text will appear in the output. An alternative version, requiring a reasonably long text, applies the same principle on the word level, how often is the word "red" followed by the word "hat" or "dog" or so on.
Here's some autopoem output:
Your strip of entirely
tired witches scarecrow me at night
That reached the next
He witches at and glow in a cruel head
Done behind the mark
Nothing but the Land of blue
And the green wizard answer with sharp teeth
(anyone care to guess the source text?)
Other ideas/algorithms/programs that fall into the same genre are dilbert's corporate values generator (now defunct?), eliza (especially when she interacts with zippy), madlibs (I don't know of a computer application), scott reynen's poetry and prose generators, rob malda's poetry generator (currently offline) & googlism.
Any suggestions or links to related programs would be greatly appreciated.
The books are much much better than the movies, even though the plot of the movies is extremely faithful to the books. A novel is more than a plot, so is a movie.
What the Harry Potter books have going for them is "profluence" ( the term John Gardner used to describe the quality of book that makes you unable to put it down, you just have to keep reading to find what happens next). A good plot can create profluence, but I think there's much more to it than that, good storytelling, empathetic characters, and above all, the ability to invoke a "vivid, continuous dream" in the reader's mind.
I think the HP books have good character development too, especially if you consider the whole series. Oddly, Harry is the flattest character in some ways.
If you want to see a movie that is more or less a 100% faithful reproduction of the book, go watch "Harry Potter".
Exactly. I thought the Harry Potter movies were just okay --- they might have been better if they were willing to sacrifice some of fidelity to the book for cinematic energy. There's a lot of plot in a full length novel, and squeezing it all in means squeezing something else out, often particular details that give character depth. The humor of the original books got lost in the movies, in my opinion.
I think the LotR movies have done a great job of picking details to flesh out the characters. I noticed the details more the second, etc. time I watched them, kind of like the books.
Agreed on deep-sixing Tom Bombadil: that's where I threw the book down in disgust in jr. high school ( and I didn't pick it up until well in adulthood.) I thought it made no sense at all: were these hobbits going to get out of every fix by singing little songs? why didn't Tom just escort them to the edge of the territory in the first place? and I didn't know enough about the ring yet to understand that it was a big deal that the ring didn't have any effect on Tom.
Faramir was a little too cold in the movie I thought, although I wonder if that was acting/directing as much as the actual script. And not nearly cute enough, either.
oh yeah, and we're having a halloween dinner party tomorrow and then going to see the original (silent) phantom of the opera, so if you're in the midwest, drop on by....
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
bumpersticker:
the Labor Movement the folks that brought you the weekend
The 40 hour workweek and paid overtime were major victories of the labor movement in the US.
So instead of some people getting in at a $10 IPO value (for example) and riding it to $100, everyone will have to pay $100 each and there will be no IPO ride.
Good point overall, but remember for every person that sold a share of stock at $100 (got the ride up from $10) there's someone who bought a share of stock at $100. Presumably, these buyers either expected the value to continue going up in the short term or they expected it to go up over time. For every person who bought low and sold high there's someone who bought high. These people typically lose money --- historically IPOs have tended to be bad investments unless you flip fast.
This only makes sense for Google, and only the owners.
Basically, what they are doing is replacing the IPO round of trading with a mechanism that more closely resembles the stock market and creates equal access for buyers. (It's still a monopoly on the supply side of course.)
The way that traditional IPOs create a windfall for people with investment bank connections (where stocks are typically priced low enough to ensure that they all shares are sold quickly, and then rise in value when they hit the market) has always struck me as a massive scam. It benefits the banks and their clients at the expense of the company and smaller investors without connections.
The whole point of an IPO is to raise money for the company --- it's supposed to benefit Google, not well connected investors.
As for the auction, the poster is absolutely correct: it's likely to suffer from the 'winner's curse.' The shares will be sold to the bidders with the very highest expectations for the stock value, making it unlikely that there will be a pool of even more bullish investors around to push the value of the the stock higher in the future.
Re:Umm.... no.
on
Pirate Hunter
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The only people who know about Talk Like a Pirate day are those doing research for arcane book reviews.
When I was a professor teaching economics everything that was handed out in the class, the syllabus, the problem sets, the exams, the solutions, were available online to anyone, as were the blog-like updates on the class with links to newspaper arrticles etc. My impression is that this is the standard now, not the exception.
MIT received a very large grant (millions of $) and phenomenal amounts of publicity for this endeavor. Consequently, I expected something more than what I and most other (non-fossilized) professors were/are already doing on our time, typically with IT support from the university. (UCSC in my case.)
When I'm learning about something new, I already go to university websites and look at course pages for ideas on references or books. It's also fun to check out literature classes for novels to read. Seedlings of this sort are already common on the web, and some have grown into healthy young trees. MIT is not starting a trend here, or coming up with some great new idea that's going to inspire other universities to follow suit -- it's already being done.
Check out this site for example http://www.scholars.uh.edu/~math1300help/ which generates practice problems and solutions for basic algebra. It's been incredibly useful for the woman I'm tutoring right now. It's way more sophisticated than the sample of things I looked at on the MIT site, provided free of charge for everyone by the University of Houston.
And if anyone is in the mood to work out some intermediate economics problems contact me through my website and I'll send you a whole lot of pdfs....
This course explores the properties of non-sequential, multi-linear, and interactive forms of narratives as they have evolved from print to digital media. Works covered in this course range from the Talmud, classics of non-linear novels, experimental literature, early sound and film experiments to recent multi-linear and interactive films and games. The study of the structural properties of narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time, space, and of storyline is complemented by theoretical texts about authorship/readership, plot/story, properties of digital media and hypertext. Questions that will be addressed in this course include: How can we define 'non-sequentiality/multi-linearity', 'interactivity', 'narrative'. To what extend are these aspects determined by the text, the reader, the digital format? What are the roles of the reader and the author? What kinds of narratives are especially suited for a non-linear/interactive format? Are there stories that can only be told in a digital format? What can we learn from early non-digital examples of non-linear and interactive story telling?
Overall, though, I have to say that the information available on the classes is a bit thin --- didn't they get a multi-million dollar grant to put this together?
Plus, a lot of the classes don't have any notes at all --- just a syllabus, reading list and some assignments, nothing that modern professors don't already have on their website. It is nice to have big catalog accessible in one place, but I'm hoping that this will encourage to professors at MIT to put more of the content of the class online, and encourage other universities to come up with similar cataloging systems.
The Wall St. Journal article ran a front page article on Aug. 28 on the blackouts, I only have the dead tree edition but here's the headline:
A Lesson From the Blackout: Free Markets Also Need Rules
Whenever there's a problem with deregulation or privatization, the response is "well, you can't really call that a 'free market'" because it wasn't really free enough. That's a cop out, in my opinion.
The reality is all markets have rules and all markets need rules. Figuring out which rules which improve the situation and which will make it worse is extremely difficult and muddied by politics -- everyone wants the set of rules that will benefit them the most, not the necessarilly the rules that achieve the stated goals of improving efficiency.
To encourage more employment in the US we should cut our extremely high payroll taxes (taxes that employers pay when they hire/pay someone) and replace them with taxes on resource use, for example, petroleum and other raw materials. This would not only help correct the "negative externality" of pollution, it would encourage the development and use of labor intensive rather than capital intensive technologies.
The Grameen Bank, the original microcredit lending bank, is using cellphone technology to help remote villages get the information they need. Of course, they don't need a mob --- just one cellphone per village, owned and operated by a "phone lady" who rents it out to anyone who needs it. That way villages get the info they need without having to wire everything in sight. Here's a Wall St Journal article about one "phone lady". And a World Bank article about the GrameenPhone network.
In the interview Gosling says: "It has really changed the way grassroots political organizing works."
I agree that the internet has made it much easier to organize people, for example, the international coordination of protests against the war on Iraq was phenomenal, but has it really enhanced the effectiveness and power of grassroots groups? I think the jury is still out on this one.
I'd love to see technology used to create more genuine opportunities for participation, but as Frederick Douglas said:
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
Legions of bloggers writing about copyright law or the PATRIOT Act won't make a difference unless we find a way to apply real political pressure through action.
My thoughts exactly: searching on amazon can be an exercise in frustration. Even if you specify the title exactly, it returns all matches with those words in any order in alphabetical or most popular order, leaving the user to wade through looking for the exact match. (No, using quotes does not fix the problem.)
Amazon has an incredibly useful collection of information about books (pretty much the only thing I buy there), but the search capabilities are the weak link. It seems like they're going for the lucrative area, despite the fact that they have no comparative advantage in searching at all.
at supermarkets with the odious 'card system' tell the cashier you forgot yours or are from out of town, often they have a number they can key in for you.
Slashdot Mirror
A techno jargon generator would produce text that would seem equally comprehensible/incomprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the definitions of the terms used. Just because I don't understand something doesn't mean it doesn't make sense, what's interesting about the article is that it recounts the author's attempt to find out if literary criticism has content or not.
I find Sokal, on the other hand, just as much of a holier-than-thou elitist as the people he criticizes, though he's a good deal funnier.
What Morningstar claims to have found from his explorations is a few good ideas with a whole lot of shite slathered on top. That would describe many many other academic disciplines outside the humanities as well.
read the Lem poem
Exactly --- algorithmic techniques can be great for providing input and inspiration, but the creative process is as much about discarding bad ideas as it is about coming up with good ones. Producing anything decent, never mind great, requires "killing your babies," being willing to get rid of things that may be funny/clever/evocative on their own, but don't contribute to the whole.
For example, I have a program called autopoem (written by Bill Sethares) loosely based on an idea from Shannon's original paper on information theory.
Suppose you took all the words in the English language and calculated how often the character "s" is followed by the character "t", the character "e", and so on. You'd end with a table of transition probabilities that showed how often each letter is followed by any other letter (or punctuation mark or space) and starting with a single seed letter you could generate "english-like" words randomly. The output using the probability that a single letter is followed by another letter doesn't actually resemble English much, nor does the output using probabilities based on two letter combinations (how often is "th" followed by "e", by "a", and so on) but by the time you get to 3 letter combinations, (how often is "the" followed by "a" or by "s") the output starts to look a lot like "twas brillig and the slithy toves", like ye olde englishe with very creative spelling.
The scheme I described above is difficult to implement in practice, because the table of probabilities gets big fast as the number of letters used to determine the next letter gets longer. Autopoem uses a particular text as a source and instead of generating a table of probabilities it scans the text looking for the next of the letter sequence, say "the", and then selects whatever letter or punctuation mark comes next, say "a", then it continues scanning until it finds the next occurrence of "hea", and selects the following letter, and so on. the longer the sequence of letters, the more likely it is that whole words or phrases from the original text will appear in the output. An alternative version, requiring a reasonably long text, applies the same principle on the word level, how often is the word "red" followed by the word "hat" or "dog" or so on.
Here's some autopoem output:
Your strip of entirely
tired witches scarecrow me at night
That reached the next
He witches at and glow in a cruel head
Done behind the mark
Nothing but the Land of blue
And the green wizard answer with sharp teeth
(anyone care to guess the source text?)
Other ideas/algorithms/programs that fall into the same genre are dilbert's corporate values generator (now defunct?), eliza (especially when she interacts with zippy), madlibs (I don't know of a computer application), scott reynen's poetry and prose generators, rob malda's poetry generator (currently offline) & googlism.
Any suggestions or links to related programs would be greatly appreciated.
What the Harry Potter books have going for them is "profluence" ( the term John Gardner used to describe the quality of book that makes you unable to put it down, you just have to keep reading to find what happens next). A good plot can create profluence, but I think there's much more to it than that, good storytelling, empathetic characters, and above all, the ability to invoke a "vivid, continuous dream" in the reader's mind.
I think the HP books have good character development too, especially if you consider the whole series. Oddly, Harry is the flattest character in some ways.
Exactly. I thought the Harry Potter movies were just okay --- they might have been better if they were willing to sacrifice some of fidelity to the book for cinematic energy. There's a lot of plot in a full length novel, and squeezing it all in means squeezing something else out, often particular details that give character depth. The humor of the original books got lost in the movies, in my opinion.
I think the LotR movies have done a great job of picking details to flesh out the characters. I noticed the details more the second, etc. time I watched them, kind of like the books.
Faramir was a little too cold in the movie I thought, although I wonder if that was acting/directing as much as the actual script. And not nearly cute enough, either.
There's a Buddhist adage that goes something like:
"it's absolutely certain that you will die, but completely unknown when."
I've finally updated my 'instant friends' guestbook.
oh yeah, and we're having a halloween dinner party tomorrow and then going to see the original (silent) phantom of the opera, so if you're in the midwest, drop on by....
the Labor Movement
the folks that brought you the weekend
The 40 hour workweek and paid overtime were major victories of the labor movement in the US.
Good point overall, but remember for every person that sold a share of stock at $100 (got the ride up from $10) there's someone who bought a share of stock at $100. Presumably, these buyers either expected the value to continue going up in the short term or they expected it to go up over time. For every person who bought low and sold high there's someone who bought high. These people typically lose money --- historically IPOs have tended to be bad investments unless you flip fast.
This only makes sense for Google, and only the owners.
Basically, what they are doing is replacing the IPO round of trading with a mechanism that more closely resembles the stock market and creates equal access for buyers. (It's still a monopoly on the supply side of course.)
The way that traditional IPOs create a windfall for people with investment bank connections (where stocks are typically priced low enough to ensure that they all shares are sold quickly, and then rise in value when they hit the market) has always struck me as a massive scam. It benefits the banks and their clients at the expense of the company and smaller investors without connections.
The whole point of an IPO is to raise money for the company --- it's supposed to benefit Google, not well connected investors.
As for the auction, the poster is absolutely correct: it's likely to suffer from the 'winner's curse.' The shares will be sold to the bidders with the very highest expectations for the stock value, making it unlikely that there will be a pool of even more bullish investors around to push the value of the the stock higher in the future.
Or those who read Dave Barry or listen to NPR.
MIT received a very large grant (millions of $) and phenomenal amounts of publicity for this endeavor. Consequently, I expected something more than what I and most other (non-fossilized) professors were/are already doing on our time, typically with IT support from the university. (UCSC in my case.)
When I'm learning about something new, I already go to university websites and look at course pages for ideas on references or books. It's also fun to check out literature classes for novels to read. Seedlings of this sort are already common on the web, and some have grown into healthy young trees. MIT is not starting a trend here, or coming up with some great new idea that's going to inspire other universities to follow suit -- it's already being done.
Check out this site for example http://www.scholars.uh.edu/~math1300help/ which generates practice problems and solutions for basic algebra. It's been incredibly useful for the woman I'm tutoring right now. It's way more sophisticated than the sample of things I looked at on the MIT site, provided free of charge for everyone by the University of Houston.
And if anyone is in the mood to work out some intermediate economics problems contact me through my website and I'll send you a whole lot of pdfs....
Plus, a lot of the classes don't have any notes at all --- just a syllabus, reading list and some assignments, nothing that modern professors don't already have on their website. It is nice to have big catalog accessible in one place, but I'm hoping that this will encourage to professors at MIT to put more of the content of the class online, and encourage other universities to come up with similar cataloging systems.
Shelob meets the Borg.
The reality is all markets have rules and all markets need rules. Figuring out which rules which improve the situation and which will make it worse is extremely difficult and muddied by politics -- everyone wants the set of rules that will benefit them the most, not the necessarilly the rules that achieve the stated goals of improving efficiency.
To encourage more employment in the US we should cut our extremely high payroll taxes (taxes that employers pay when they hire/pay someone) and replace them with taxes on resource use, for example, petroleum and other raw materials. This would not only help correct the "negative externality" of pollution, it would encourage the development and use of labor intensive rather than capital intensive technologies.
The Grameen Bank, the original microcredit lending bank, is using cellphone technology to help remote villages get the information they need. Of course, they don't need a mob --- just one cellphone per village, owned and operated by a "phone lady" who rents it out to anyone who needs it. That way villages get the info they need without having to wire everything in sight. Here's a Wall St Journal article about one "phone lady". And a World Bank article about the GrameenPhone network.
I agree that the internet has made it much easier to organize people, for example, the international coordination of protests against the war on Iraq was phenomenal, but has it really enhanced the effectiveness and power of grassroots groups? I think the jury is still out on this one.
I'd love to see technology used to create more genuine opportunities for participation, but as Frederick Douglas said:
Legions of bloggers writing about copyright law or the PATRIOT Act won't make a difference unless we find a way to apply real political pressure through action.The folks who patented one-click ordering may not turn out to be such principled defenders of competition.
Amazon has an incredibly useful collection of information about books (pretty much the only thing I buy there), but the search capabilities are the weak link. It seems like they're going for the lucrative area, despite the fact that they have no comparative advantage in searching at all.
use cash instead of credit cards.
at supermarkets with the odious 'card system' tell the cashier you forgot yours or are from out of town, often they have a number they can key in for you.